This section provides background information related to the present disclosure which is not necessarily prior art.
Technologies exist by which autonomous robots are used to deliver goods from a store room to a particular destination, such as a hotel room. One such technology is disclosed in United States patent publication no. 2015/0242806, entitled “ENTRYWAY BASED AUTHENTICATION SYSTEM”, the entire content of which is incorporated herein by reference.
These technologies rely on store rooms and stock rooms being suitably configured to load the autonomous robot. For example, store room racks may be specifically designed to place articles, such as towels, into a receptacle of a robot.
The store room racks are specifically designed to deliver a known article into a known position on or in the robot. Since the store room racks are designed with a particular product in mind, such technologies do not readily adapt for use with articles of unknown size, shape, weight and orientation.
In addition, the robot may assume the store room contains sufficient stock and thus can collect the relevant articles whenever the robot is available to do so. Such technologies therefore do not readily adapt to cases where store rooms do not routinely carry the relevant articles and thus the availability of those articles cannot be assumed to match the availability of the robot seeking to pick them up.
It would be useful to provide an alternative technology that removes or reduces one or more of the aforementioned problems.